By David Wiesner
A boy finds an old camera washed up on the beach, develops the film, and discovers a secret underwater world, and this wordless book lets your child make the same jaw-dropping discovery.
A curious boy is poking around at the beach when a wave leaves an old-fashioned underwater camera at his feet. He takes the film to be developed, and the photographs are astonishing: a city of fish with windows and lights, mechanical fish swimming beside real ones, an octopus reading a book in an armchair, tiny green aliens on holiday, a puffer fish floating like a hot-air balloon. And then the strangest photo of all, a child holding a photo of a child holding a photo of a child, a chain of children stretching back and back across the whole world and across time, each of whom found this same camera. The boy adds his own picture to the chain and throws the camera back to the sea, so it can find the next child. Not one word, and your child gets to solve the whole wonderful mystery.
Some children love to figure things out; this is catnip for them, and it needs no reading at all, because the whole story is a visual puzzle you solve by looking closely. A reluctant reader gets pulled in not by text but by the itch to understand what the camera saw, and that itch, following clues, holding a mystery in your head, testing a guess, is the exact thinking that reading is made of. The imagination on every spread is enormous, which keeps even a squirmy child leaning in. It won the Caldecott Medal, and it rewards a child who goes back through it again looking for what they missed.